Nobody even remembered that he had been a Dreyfusard, partly because people in society are inattentive and forgetful, also because it had all been a very long time ago, a time which people affected to believe was even longer ago, as one of the most fashionable ideas was the claim that the prewar period was separated from the war by something as deep, something seemingly as long-lasting, as a geological period, and Brichot himself, the great nationalist, whenever he made allusion to the Dreyfus case, would say: “In those prehistoric times.”
